By the eighteenth century, Orthodox missionaries from Russia arrived in the Western Hemisphere (what is today Alaska) and introduced Orthodoxy to North America; also, the first Greek community was founded in St. Augustine, Florida as early as 1768. By 1864, the first Greek Orthodox Church was founded in New Orleans, Louisiana. Soon after, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the liberation of the Orthodox people from the Moslem Turks and the mass immigration of Europeans to the United States, Orthodox communities sprouted all over the Western Hemisphere.

Soon, communities of Orthodox immigrants from Greece, Russia, the Middle East, etc., settled in the United States and Canada and, perhaps knowing that they were here to stay, requested from the Orthodox Churches in their respective homelands to send priests and bishops in order to serve the spiritual and cultural needs of the various Orthodox people. Thus, even to this day, here in America the Orthodox Churches, though sharing the same faith and teachings, are known as the Greek, Russian, Serbian, Antiochian, etc., Orthodox Churches. The primary thing that distinguishes them from one another is their use of language. Since immigration of Orthodox people has drastically declined in the past 10 years or so in the United States; and, the fact that many Orthodox Christians do not strongly identify themselves with their ethnic heritage-due perhaps to the great increase of interfaith marriages-it is quite possible and most likely that one day the various Orthodox jurisdictions here in America may identify
themselves as an American Orthodox Church.